


Civil Twilight

by fluorescentgrey



Category: MASH (TV)
Genre: Canon Era, Concussions, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Tag on S4E19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:34:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27175958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: A couple purgatorial post-concussion dreams.
Relationships: B. J. Hunnicutt/Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce
Comments: 6
Kudos: 50
Collections: MAIL CALL: M*A*S*H Flash Festival





	Civil Twilight

The icebreaker passed through the harbor like a comet in the perpetual night. It was ten in the morning. At home, it would have been bright and clear and someone would have been making eggs. Instead, they had gotten kicked out of the bar again for being drunk and disorderly. The landlady had to say this because of army regulations, but she was always forgiving. There weren’t enough people in this godforsaken place for her to maintain much of a blacklist unless you did something really unforgivable. Besides, Hawkeye thought she liked him because she lived down the hall and had never said anything about the nocturnal screaming. In a place like this, other people were probably screaming worse, and there were other things besides people screaming out there with people-ish screams. This was where they put you if you failed all the other requisite tests, he’d figured in the beginning. This was truly purgatory. The snow held every single thing in a thrall of stillness. Bright bitter light across the endless white spilling through the frosted windows on the second floors of the weather-beaten barracks where, apparently, people lived.

“What day is it,” Hawkeye said. “Where are we? Who are we?”

B.J. nestled his mustache into his furry hood. “You’re asking me?”

There was no choice but to go home and try to sleep. “What are we doing here,” Hawkeye asked. Boots crunching in the old snow, new snow. He was sure he knew the answers to these questions but couldn’t quite call them forth to mind at present. “What have we been drinking?”

“That, I can tell you,” B.J. said. “Pure grain alcohol with kool-aid powder in it.”

“What flavor?”

“Red. What else?”

The dormitory was utterly still. Around here people tended to wake up around noon, when sometimes, theoretically, one could glimpse the sun, or the idea of the sun, and then pass out again until the early evening, when one could reasonably begin drinking. The hallways were warm enough that you wouldn’t die if you fell asleep in them, and they divested themselves of their heavy woolen layers as they climbed the stairs. “What are we doing here,” Hawkeye said again.

“Fighting for democracy,” B.J. said. Then he started laughing. He had to lean against the wall and couldn’t go on.

“Well, I know that.”

“We’re watching,” B.J. said. “Watching. That’s all. That’s all we can do!”

“We do the best we can but really we’re only watching,” Hawkeye remembered. B.J. touched his nose. “Jeez. What a raw deal.”

The apartment was two squalid rooms. A couple of beds, a stove with one functional burner, the grimy sink full of dirty dishes, an empty refrigerator, foot lockers, crooked pinups, an old calendar, frigid tile floors carpeted with dirty laundry. He stood on the threshold and surveyed it. The streetlight from outside came filthily through the window, yellow as grease on the unmade beds, the sweat-stained mattresses. “God. What is this place?”

“This is hell, Hawk,” B.J. said brightly, letting a little rust-color water run from the tap before he filled the kettle.

“But it’s so cold.”

“The ninth circle of hell is cold,” B.J. reminded him, “according to Dante.”

The kettle screamed. They drank weak tea, watched, waited, knowing there would be no sun. When there indeed wasn’t, they slept. He dreamed. At one point he woke up and was aware that he was being held. Then he dreamed again.

\--

There were only so many places you could hide on a ship like this. B.J. was in the hold with the corpses. They were wrapped up like mummies, so he was just standing over them. “What are you doing down here,” Hawkeye asked him.

“I have the feeling I missed something.”

“What could you have missed?” It was frigid cold — not as frigid cold as outside but nearly. Not cold enough so that your breath would freeze upon your exhale and fall to the ground as a solid object, but nearly. The ice was all around them here, creaking and moaning like Frankenstein’s monster beyond a few inches of pressure-warped wood. “You’re gonna catch your death.”

Back up in the little forward chamber where they were obliged to do all the stitching of lashes and the severing of frostbitten toes and scurvy exams and autopsies and all the other various and sundry associated with being a navy surgeon, B.J. sat in front of the little stove and Hawkeye made him hold a cup of tea, even though he just looked into it without drinking it. The surface was still except for on occasion when a vibration would pass through the dark liquid, as though someone had thrown a stone into it from the distant shore.

“I’m contractually obligated to say this to you even though you won’t hear it,” Hawkeye said. “It’s not your fault and there was nothing you could’ve done.”

B.J. put his forehead in the palm of his gloved hand. Cold made you brittle — when you got hit the wrong way you could break. Hawkeye rested the back of his hand at the nape of B.J.’s neck and felt him shiver. His carotid pulse was steady against Hawkeye’s fingertips.

\--

The droning sound the river made in the canyon had kind of taken his consciousness away, so it was a while before he realized that his hands were numb. They were colorless white between the smooth reddish cobbles and the clear rushing current, but at least there was no blood anymore, except underneath his fingernails and drenching the sleeves of his coat halfway to his elbow. He stuck his hands into his armpits and stood up, feeling the blood rush back into his feet. He felt old. B.J. was coming down to the creek from the tents above. “You look like a butcher,” he said.

“I am a butcher,” Hawkeye told him. “So are you.”

There was a lot of burning severed limbs in pits. That was about half the job, it seemed.

B.J. offered him a filigreed silver flask from the pocket of his fatigues. Hawkeye took it and promptly dropped it. “I can’t feel my hands,” he explained.

“What happened? Why?”

“The river’s cold.”

B.J. retrieved the flask and opened it and held the cool silver mouth to Hawkeye’s lips, as though it were medicine. The camphorated oil type smell of whatever spirits were within overpowered even the blood. He closed his eyes and tried to think of home, of his mother, but she wasn’t there anymore. There was nothing there anymore. Everything got taken away, shredded, bent and broken.

B.J. let him have a generous belt. Whatever the spirit was, it tasted sweet and charred and burning like bourbon or something but brighter and more astringent. Once he was done, B.J. finished the rest of it. He was newer at this but he knew as well as Hawkeye or anyone that they had to make the best of whatever they could get.

“Do you ever forget where you came from,” Hawkeye asked. The blood rushing back into his hands hurt. “Do you ever wonder what happened before this?”

B.J. was not particularly shocked by this line of questioning. They had had this conversation before, but Hawkeye forgot when. “You’re from Maine,” B.J. said. “You're still a person with a past and future. Don’t forget.”

\--

For the common good of humanity, he sequestered himself away in a fire lookout tower in the mountains. He didn't particularly want to, but he understood it was the best course of action. Every couple of weeks, B.J. showed up, having navigated the ridge on cross-country skis, looking like some kind of beautiful Swiss Olympian, hauling a sledge stocked with dry goods. Oats, pickled herring, wheat thins. A handful of fresh blueberries wrapped in a handkerchief. And a handle of gin, or two.

“You’ve got to stop doing this,” Hawkeye said, helping B.J. carry the boxes inside. He had been sitting by the woodstove, knitting, listening to static or jazz or staticky jazz or jazzy static on the radio depending upon the positioning of the satellites. “We’ve talked about this. I’m especially dangerous to you.”

B.J. filtered through the boxes until he found the Beefeater, and he poured himself a belt in a dirty glass he unearthed from the mess in the sink. “And we’ve talked about this,” he said. “You have to come back. You’ve been out here for too long. You’re starting to freak me out.”

“Someone has to…” But he stopped. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was doing up here. The long, abstract crooked stripe of his knitting spilled across the floor.

“It’s not good for you to be alone,” B.J. went on, like he was commenting on the weather. “You get inside your head.”

He found another dirty glass in the sink and poured Hawkeye some gin too. The expression he was wearing was familiar, guiltyish.

“Aha!” Hawkeye announced.

“What?”

“This _is_ inside my head.”

“Yeah, case in point.” B.J. downed the gin, so Hawkeye did too. “You’ve got to come back before you start crawling up the walls.”

“Come back where?”

“The surface of the earth,” B.J. said. “The mortal coil. The land of the — ”

\--

[ “— careful,” somebody was saying, “careful, careful with his head.”

It was like coming up from underwater. He was floating for a blissful moment before he sank again. ]

\--

The sun came up on a room where there was no color. Brown walls, gray blankets, nurses in olive drab. No color at all but blood. The most beautiful woman in the world came over and said, “Hiya, Hawkeye.”

“Hiya.”

“You feel alright?”

“Better now that you're here.”

She gave him a little grin. Her gentle little fingers went to the hurt spot on his forehead and brushed over the place where the lens was still adjusting. Then she said, “I’ll get B.J.”

He remembered the Jeep turning over, and the taste of homemade kimchi, and reluctantly understood that this was probably real. Well, it was no better or worse than the others.

B.J. came stampeding in the door in about three seconds flat and pulled a stool over to Hawkeye’s bedside. “There you are,” he said. He had given up trying to keep his face from exploding into the most beautiful Grade A-1 melon-slice grin ever witnessed by humans. “You went away for a little bit.”

“I forgot about the detail that you’re supposed to rest your brain,” Hawkeye told him. “I only remembered I had to stay awake. I was trying to do all the monologues from _Richard III_ for those poor people.”

“You passed out once we got you in the Jeep,” B.J. said. “I gotta tell you, that was the winter of my discontent.”

Hawkeye laughed, even though it hurt. “Good one, you.”

“Will you let me look at you a second?”

He figured he could pass this off on the head injury: “You can look at me as long as you want.”

B.J. blushed. That was a sight for sore eyes. “It’s not bad,” he said, checking bandages and stitches and pulse and pupils with warm hands. “Lacerations, bruises, concussion. Anything hurt?”

“Head’s tender. I had these crazy — dreams, I guess.”

“What happened?”

“Not much. You were there.” _And I felt your heartbeat and you held me in the cold…_

“The roads were bad,” B.J. said, answering his own version of his own question, “and there was bad shelling and you were so far out I thought you were dying so Radar had to talk me down. That’s all.”

“ _Radar_ had to talk _you_ down?”

“Yeah.” B.J. laughed. “You should’ve been there.”

“I guess I should’ve.”

B.J. patted Hawkeye’s knee under the blankets. “I’ll read to you,” he said.

“Don’t you have other patients?” 

“Frank’s technically on shift.”

“Key word: technically. Where is he?”

“I’ll give you three guesses. But Peggy sent me the new Graham Greene, I can read you that.”

“I suppose you can’t read me the best parts of the new _Nudist Quarterly_.”

B.J. laughed and stood, knees cracking, towering above the bed like some or another anatomical marvel by Michelangelo. “Hawk, you’re supposed to be resting your brain.”

Hawkeye closed his eyes while B.J. went back to the Swamp for the paperback, already hating how tired out he was by the mildest conversation. He slipped a little again, kaleidoscoping through colors, dreams, place, time, present, future, stumbling into an embrace, the late-day sun, smoke, dust, cradling each other at the end of all things — and plummeted back into Korea when the stool at his bedside squealed under B.J.’s weight. “You alright?” B.J. asked him in tones of precious concern. “You want to sleep?”

“No, I’m alright. I’m listening.”

B.J. opened the book. “Chapter One,” he read. “A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead…”

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this is technically a little long for this collection for which i apologize. this story is meant to follow up on S4E19, "Hawkeye."


End file.
